Share This Story!

Culture changed for worse in Trenton

Kevin O’Dowd, the chief of staff for Gov. Chris Christie, acquitted himself well during his seven hours of testimony on Monday before the Legislature’s special committee investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closures.

Kevin O’Dowd, the chief of staff for Gov. Chris Christie, acquitted himself well during his seven hours of testimony on Monday before the Legislature’s special committee investigating the George Washington Bridge lane closures.

He was what legislators and fellow administration members have always said: forthright, smart and personable. Those attributes have served him well as chief of staff and he used them in a convincing manner to express his lack of involvement in or prior knowledge of the September 2013 lane closures.

But when it came to O’Dowd’s next move, the testimony wasn’t as convincing. Christie has indicated that he wants O’Dowd to become the state’s next attorney general, essentially the chief law enforcement voice in New Jersey. But legislators seemed less certain that he had said all that he needed to in order to make that move up a reality.

Lack of curiosity

“I will say that, as a member of the Assembly who often doesn’t get an opportunity to opine on such matters, certainly the curious lack of curiosity is very troubling,” said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-Middlesex, a co-chair of the special committee.

Wisniewski was referencing O’Dowd’s lack of preemptive action when faced with the possibility that former deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly had some level of involvement with the lane closures. Before Christie made his famous December declaration that his office was not involved in the scandal, O’Dowd knew that an email existed indicating that Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich had complained to Kelly’s office about the lane closures and the possibility that they were politically motivated.

What did O’Dowd do next? Not much.

While O’Dowd’s personal employment opportunities are an interesting sidebar to his testimony, his comments also cast doubt on a central premise to Christie’s philosophy of governing.

In 2009, then-candidate Christie warned that he was planning to bring a lot of his fellow prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office down to Trenton to shake up the culture. The theory was that they would ask questions no one else was asking and root out endemic problems, thereby cleaning up a bureaucracy that has long been considered bloated and unresponsive.

More than 20 former prosecutors who worked with Christie made the transition to the administration. O’Dowd was one of them.

What happend to shake-up?

But what of that vaunted shake-up? The distribution of Sandy aid is illustrative. People have complained that the process was complicated, that they couldn’t get answers and that they were denied aid for unexplained reasons. While the administration has sought to cast blame for the problem on the federal government, the letters denying aid were signed by the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, Richard Constable, a former federal prosecutor. The problem of an unresponsive government was not solved in this case. Rather, it seems that the department doubled down on the dysfunction.

For another example, take a look at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Former authority Chairman David Samson had been the state’s attorney general at one point, and while he never worked for Christie, he did have a close relationship with the governor. Was the Port Authority cleaned up under Samson? Far from it. In fact, Samson became so entangled with potential conflicts of interest that he stepped down.

Then there is O’Dowd. Over the years, he’s proven himself a competent political hand, but when he had the chance to use his prosecutorial zeal with Kelly, he didn’t. Rather, he seemed to punt to Christie’s chief counsel, Charles McKenna, another former prosecutor who apparently didn’t show much interest in ferreting out details either.

So what happened to this culture change? Why, rather than a complete reversal of business as usual in Trenton, did we get even more business as usual in Trenton? The answer may lie in the premium that Christie placed on loyalty rather than a real culture change. O’Dowd alluded to that on Monday, when he said he gave Kelly and others the “benefit of the doubt.”

“You work together in a close environment. You trust people. You work with people,” O’Dowd told the committee. “It’s difficult to divorce that when you’re inquiring of people.”

Difficult, yes. But it’s the type of divorce that prosecutors should do all the time, no matter how painful. In this case and in others, Christie’s team has failed us.